Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Recently eaten: spaghetti and meatballsRecent annoyance: adopt all the babies you want, you still can't stop AIDS or poverty that way. humph!

So apparently the French are so offensive, they are turning Japanese people into slobbering maniacs. I'm not really sure what this says about French people, or the Japanese for that matter.

Paris Syndrome leave Japanese tourists in shockAround a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported Sunday.

"A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses," Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.

Already this year, Japan's embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors -- including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them.

Previous cases include a man convinced he was the French "Sun King," Louis XIV, and a woman who believed she was being attacked with microwaves, the paper cited Japanese embassy official Yoshikatsu Aoyagi as saying.

"Fragile travelers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis," psychologist Herve Benhamou told the paper.

The phenomenon, which the newspaper dubbed "Paris Syndrome," was first detailed in the psychiatric journal Nervure in 2004.

"In Japanese shops, the customer is king, whereas here assistants hardly look at them ... People using public transport all look stern, and handbag snatchers increase the ill feeling."

A Japanese woman, Aimi, told the paper: "For us, Paris is a dream city. All the French are beautiful and elegant ... And then, when they arrive, the Japanese find the French character is the complete opposite of their own."

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About Me

On the evolutionary scale, I am quite advanced from the skull down: little to no hair on arms and legs, fantastically long toes, and virtually indestructible exoskeleton. However, my skull retains it's australopithecine sagittal crest. I have worn my molars down from years of grinding on mammoth bones. My keen wolf-like sense of smell can lead me to food within a 10 mile radius.